that of destroying popular beliefs. If it were not to run the hazard of bringing witch-burning into repute again, we should much like to assert that while wizards and alchemists flourished society was more honest and simple and courteous; and to confirm our statement, we should allege that in villages where a little superstition still lingers there is more true courteousness and brotherly love than in many places which are better enlightened. However, it is an ill-work to stop the wheels of progress. If we turn to the domain of history, Niebuhr and Grote have shown that truth and certainty do not lie on the surface of primitive legends; yet few, we apprehend, are duly grateful for the criticism which has destroyed a belief in the exploits of the heroes so dear to their childhood. Thus, when we consider how intimately our daily hopes and fears are bound up with the uncertainty of the weather—how important an element is its fickleness in the intercourse of social life—how naturally we give and accept guesses on its present and future aspects as often as we shake hands with a friend, it is not too much to predict that he who shall succeed in bringing meteorological phenomena under a few simple laws, so as to enable every man to be his own weather-prophet, will not win a gracious welcome from most domestic philosophers. How mournful then will it be to see Paterfamilias tapping the barometer that to him, at least, was never wont to be mendacious, or inspecting the skies as he used to do every morning in pre-scientific times, when Charlie—home for the holidays, with some “Smith’s Law,” or “Jones’s Theory,” at his fingers’ ends—will be able to inform his father in a moment, that “rainy days being as the squares of the full moon, to-day, the 9th of May, must be fine until three o’clock.”
Yet it is to this end that inductive science practically looks. She sets before her the noble purpose of increasing man’s command over nature, and so lessening the amount of dangers to life and property with which the elements are fraught. To reduce under fixed laws the atmospheric causes of these dangers, which seem in single instances so capricious, this is what induction as applied to the physical sciences seeks to effect. Of these sciences meteorology is still in its infancy. So very many causes in our island home concur to make up a rainy day that we cannot as yet seize them, or ascertain their mutual connection and sequence. Nay, no two people are at present agreed as to what is a rainy day. Johnson was in his office during business hours, but it was fine after breakfast and again when he walked home to dinner; he can therefore by no means agree with Thompson who assures him next morning that yesterday was the wettest day of the season—he wished to take his wife to Sydenham, and it poured all day. Harrison’s remembrance of it, again, is, that all the morning was fine; he was up long before his usual time to go to Exeter by the South Western, and it was only, he will tell you, as he approached the treacherous county of Devon, that it began to rain at all. Again, to continue our familiar illustrations, A.’s gauge measured so many decimals on such a day; he has only registered observations for two years, and finding this the maximum he has known, confidently pronounces it an exceptionally wet day. His neighbour B., with a register of a dozen years, knows that very many such days occur in such a time, and judges it therefore an ordinarily wet day. C., however, a Fellow of two or three meteorological societies, and familiar with the registration of half a century, sees nothing at all uncommon in it. For it is an axiom of meteorology, as indeed of all the statistical sciences, that it requires the careful registration of many years before any definite conclusions can be drawn as to the rainfall at any particular place. When we add that all stations vary with the physical conformation round them in regard to the amount of rain they receive, that even at the same place observations taken on the ground and from an instrument elevated only a few feet above it differ greatly, owing to currents, evaporation, radiation, &c., some idea of the Protean character of the facts with which the meteorologist has to grapple may be formed.
Unlike many of the sciences sprung from modern research, meteorology is pursued at a great disadvantage, as we are solely dependent on hypothesis and observation for a knowledge of its laws. It is true that one observation, or series of observations, can be tested by others, and one generalisation corrected by another; but experiment, the handmaid of observation, cannot in this case go hand in hand with it. Even what seems such an impracticable science as geology enjoys greater advantages in this respect, for the chemist’s art can imitate the structure of many rocks and minerals sufficiently to verify theory. At present, however, we must mainly look to observation, as statistically developed, for the laws of rainfall. It is a great step to know the mean fall of, say ten years, at any place in the United Kingdom; inductions may be drawn from this; by comparing results at different places; different theories may be evolved, or light thrown on some leading view. At all events, a body of statistics furnishes even an outside labourer with something on which to work. It is every one’s part who is at all interested in the study to contribute what he can of time and observation towards supplying additional facts on our rainfall. And eventually, where a large amount of figures has been amassed, the future genius, we may hope, whose quick wit shall turn them to the best account, will hit out the exact law underlying all. Inferences will then easily be drawn, conferring a particular knowledge at every station where the rainfall has been registered, of the seemingly capricious alternations of fair and wet in our climate.
It was in this way that Humboldt was enabled to lay down his “isothermal lines” in the analogous phenomena of temperature. It is to this end that Mr. G. J. Symons has just published a pamphlet “On the Distribution of Rain over the British Isles during the Years 1860 and 1861, as observed at about 500 stations in Great Britain and Ireland,” which is exceedingly valuable to all who take an interest in the weather. “In 1861,” Mr. Symons remarks, “England, as a whole, was below the average, and Scotland above it” (taking the mean of the ten years 1850 to 1859 as the standard of reference). Places on the west